Windhu - "Pulse"

Robert McMillan, IDG News Service writes.... You knew the argument had to come up sometime: survive the economic down turn by using open source to help you save money. Now Computer World blogger Steve J. Vaughan-Nichols makes that claim in his Linux Will Save Us blog post. The title almost has religious overtones. I found Steve's article thanks to blog posts by Alan Shimel and Michael Farnum . Whether it's iPhones, Linux vs. Microsoft , or Macs vs. PCs, there's always a group who are so overly passionate about their favorite hammer that everything else looks like a nail. I've developed many products on Linux, Windows and some even on Macs, to know that taking your favorite technology too seriously creates other blind spots in your logic and decision making. That said, I can't claim I've never done the same, but hopefully I've learned from those experiences. (My picking on Apple is all in good fun, btw.) Okay, now back to Steve's post about ditching...

Wisdom comes with proper belief. It is always the team work which goes beyond the one man’s effort. We have seen and witnessed that. So did we find out what was the problem? Why one party went beyond the expectation and others were just spectators of their success? Surely we have seen a wonderful performance. But was it just a single person’s effort? Managing a team is a hard work; it can be the most difficult of all the tasks. Just having a good team or crowd doesn ’t work, it is always the guidance of the leader and support of the members which makes the team work. Teams can only be put to work with a people oriented manager. A manager who tries to understand and tries to listen to his team members can go beyond an ordinary person’s expectation and even can break the limit of human barriers. So it is up tous to decide what we want to be. Just knowing doesn ’t work and we have seen it by experience. The point here is very simple. Knowledge and wisdom are two different things. Just kn...

Author: Jason Hiner Writes... It’s become horribly cliche to talk about the importance of IT-business alignment and the need for IT professionals to become much more business-savvy, but Gartner’s Tom Austin (right) takes it to the next level. He believes that the IT professional of the future will be less of an engineer and more of a social scientist. What? Yes, you heard that right — the word “social” will become a key part of the IT professional’s job description. It flies in the face of most of the stereotypes about techies and it sounds a little corny, but Austin does draw some interesting conclusions that are worth a look, if only because they are so unconventional. Here are some of the most salient quotes from Austin on this subject (from an interview in Fast Company ): “The problem with IT today is there are too many engineers and not enough social scientists.” “Too often, we have measurement and reward systems that are focused on how many transactions did you process, how man...

Still it’s not too late to start organizing! Forming a company is no child’s play. It is hard work. Things won’t work unless we make them work. Now we are facing a real challenge, the challenge of organizing the challenge of working together. We need to find ways that we can contribute. It doesn’t have to be always the hard way. There are various ways in which we can contribute, our company needs our help. We are really messed up. But still it’s not too late to start organizing. Ever wonder why we are lagging behind? Why we can’t organize? Why we are confused? Sure there are many reasons. But one thing is lack of commitment and guidance. There are people who can work but they are waiting for some guidelines. They need someone to tell them what to do, otherwise they can’t work. It is true, not everyone can think of their own and start working when leadership positions are being filled. So why we are falling back? So why we are messing the whole thing? One reason is we don’t have enough ...

Com on people! Speak it up! We are humans and we are not perfect. We all know that, don’t we? And it is our nature that we commit mistakes and that we do stupid things sometimes. As much as this is our nature, we should also try to contribute to make things work nicely instead of encouraging making mistakes. I think we all can agree on this. Isn’t it? Even though we all agree, we step back when it comes to implementation. Even if we know something is not right, we are reluctant to take any action. Why is that? Even we feel if something is not right, we turn back and we never do anything, of course other than just speaking about it to ourselves or with our friends who can really do nothing about this. Why is that? An example of this was seen and witnessed recently. Yes, I am talking about our class, the business computing class. When we all did know that the time given to complete the assessment was not enough and it was nearly impossible for many of us to complete it on time, st...

Stage one - You don’t know much You are in awe of all the other techs. You make a lot of dumb mistakes. You feel like you are swamped all the time. You have to read a lot before you dare try anything for fear of breaking something. Everybody dumps on you because you are the new kid. Things take longer for you to accomplish. You work a lot of overtime, often without pay. You don’t get paid a lot. You wonder if you’ll ever get a break. You realize that school didn’t quite prepare you for the real world. Work hard. You’ll make it. Stage two - You know a lot of stuff You’re good and you know it. So does everyone else around you. They can see that you are good. You don’t have to tell them. Things get done quickly. You even amaze yourself sometimes. You are valuable and can command a good salary. The managers and business owners want to keep you on board. They want you to be happy and offer perks to entice you to stay. You get calls from headhunters all the time. It is very flattering and a ...

Earlier this month, GigaOm’s Alistair Croll wrote a terrificly depressing and honest piece about the ways the Internet is changing and, as a result, some of the potential disasters that could bring it to its knees in the future. Below is Croll’s list of the top “10 Ways the Internet (As We Know It) Will Die.” Someone subverts DNS Zombie networks attack Massive physical infrastructure failure Death by a thousand fragments A really good virus breaks the routers Updates break how updates work The Net stops being neutral The lawyers get involved Walled gardens Humans take themselves out Bottom line for IT leaders Since the Internet is a mission critical system for doing business, IT leaders should take a general interest in promoting practices that support a stable, neutral, and secure Internet. Some of the issues in this article are a little overblown — such as DNS being subverted and updates breaking updates — but it correctly notes that the Internet is currently f...